There’s a difference. If they wanted to spy on me today, they’d have to look at the logs my ISP keeps into perpetuity to find my usernames on HN and then some unfortunate person has to read hundreds or thousands of comments and take extensive notes of the controversial political and social opinions that I hold.

Additionally, even without ISP logs, an AI could find my accounts online by comparing my writing style and the facts of my life that get mentioned in brief passing across all my comments. It’s probably a more unique fingerprint than a lot of people realize.

With an AI, someone would just have to ask with the prompt “what are the antisocial opinions of first name last name”? And it’d be instant and effectively free compared to the dozens of hours and high expense of doing it manually

Mass spying, and mass killing based on it, assisted by AI.

Did you read the post?

The author delineates between surveillance and spying, primarily, by saying mass data collection has been happening for years. Actually doing something with that data has been more difficult. AI summarizes audio and text well, which will turn collection into actual analysis, which the author calls spying.

Did you disagree?